Sadly, incidents like these are becoming more and more common across Europe. When travelling through Germany in early January, I happened to stumble upon an article in Der Tagesspiegel/edition Berlin-Brandenburg (Jan 4, 2005 issue). Its header read: "Junge Muslime werden immer religioeser" – Young Muslims become ever more religious. I’ll translate the gist of it:

Recep is a pupil in the Hector-Peterson College in Kreuzberg and four times a week in a Quran school. The 16-year old tries to live according to the words of the Prophet: pray five times a day, fast during Ramadan, never drink alcohol. He doesn’t go to the disco, but every Friday to the Mosque. That girls enter marriage as virgins is for Recep as evident as it is for his female colleague, 17-year old Meryem. Since the fourth grade she wears the hijab, prays five times a day and visits the Mosque every day during Ramadan….

The Hector Peterson College’s staff estimates that over the past five to eight years its Muslim youth has become ever more religious. Of 490 pupils, three quarters are Muslims. Today four out of 20 girls per class wear the hijab – where ten years ago it was four in the entire school. Back then, girls participating in swimming lessons and school travels was no theme for their parents – it is now.

Hamburg-based sociologist Necla Kelek, questioning Muslim youths for over ten years now, estimates that today at least half of them follows lessons in Quran schools. The politician’s hopes that Germany’s Muslims would secularize more as they further integrated into German society has proven vain. To the contrary: the 100,000 Muslim youths living in Berlin are more religious than they were one generation ago.

Gerhard Raehme, Principal of the Carl-Von-Ossietzky College sees a link between ardent faith and social problems: "the 90s generations still found a job on the chain (automobile industry, MFBB). These jobs are just not there anymore". For the frustrated, the Quran offered a new identity and confidence, as well as the desire to be different from the "infidels" – and better. Frustrations do however not start upon beginning to look for a job. The past year, 40% of Muslim youths left the Carl-Von-Ossietzky college without a diploma.

(from the Berliner Tagesspiegel)

MFBB's simple peasant's brain figures that if in today's world you don't work and study F*CKING HARD to acquire a minimum of technological skills, you are at best doomed to some pussy superfluous badly paid government job and at worst screwed big time. Also, in November he had a conversation with one of his clients, a woman who worked as a stock keeper in a Colruyt storage facility in Halle/central Belgium (Colruyt being the Belgian equivalent of Wal-Mart). Many of her co-workers were Moroccans. Male Moroccans, that is. They DO NOT ALLOW their women to work outside the house. Now, you may or may not know that Belgium is an expensive country. You wanna get your children the best education and still live a comfortable life, both you and your wife have to have full time jobs. Even so, with soaring ground prices and excessive taxes, there will be precious little left for some extravaganzas. What ‘s the result for the families of my clients Muslim co-workers? Relative poverty. Their children finding themselves on problem schools, more often than not becoming problems themselves all too soon. In schools in Brussels, a grand majority of teachers, confronted regularly with violence, effected insurances against such violence on their own, abandoned as they generally are by the school staff and the Ministry of Education.

Look, I ain’t a racist. I wholeheartedly support the US effort to plant the seeds of democracy in the Middle East. We have to stand by moderate, peace-loving Muslims and encourage them with all means possible to advocate professing a truly humane form of Islam. And I do hope with all my heart that in the hopefully many states where Freedom and Rule of Law will reign, moderate Islamic scholars will find the courage to come forward to define a modernized Islam adapted to today’s world and no longer forming a burden for the faithful in achieving prosperity.

I further hope, WITH ALL OF MY HEART, that from this blossoming of a newly defined Islamic religion a benevolent fallout will in time reach Europe to teach our Muslim populations how Islam can be lived without jeopardizing your own chances of success in today’s complicated world.

But…

Only a fool would just resort to possibly idle expectations. I hope just as strongly that in Europes military headquarters contingency plans using military force are being prepared to confront massive Muslim violence in a time span of, say, twenty years. You know, just in case. Anyone thinks MFBB has lost it, You Are A Fool.

The trends are there, plain to see. The US effort in the ME is literally a race against time to turn Islam into something no longer threatening the rest of the world. It may have come just in time. It may not have. Future will tell.